


Attack of Nerves

by notaverse



Series: JE Fleet [2]
Category: Johnny's Entertainment, KAT-TUN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, M/M, Military, Space Pirates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-01
Updated: 2011-10-01
Packaged: 2017-10-24 05:34:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 19,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/259558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notaverse/pseuds/notaverse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The crew of the JE Fleet ship KAT-TUN are given a new mission, to boldly go where several men from Osaka have gone before, and find out what attacked the K8. The answer lies somewhere in Jin's murky past, and only Kame, with the help of an advanced video game console, can save the day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **Title:** Attack of Nerves (1/5)  
>  **Series:** JE Fleet  
>  **Fandom:** JE (specifically, KAT-TUN)  
>  **Pairing:** Kame x Jin, though others are mentioned  
>  **Rating:** PG-13  
>  **Genre:** AU, sci-fi, crack, comedy, fluff, angst, you name it...  
>  **Disclaimer:** I do not own any of the bands, individuals or songs mentioned within.

"Port!"

"Starboard!"

"Port!"

"Starboard!"

"Port!"

Akanishi Jin, captain of the JE Jaguar-class ship KAT-TUN, admitted defeat. "Fine. Just steer us whichever way's quickest out of the Sol System."

Kamenashi Kazuya, the other captain of the JE Jaguar-class ship KAT-TUN, grinned triumphantly and sat back in the right captain's seat to watch his partner fume. In the fifteen months since his "rescue" from the Fahngarlians, Kame had won more than his fair share of arguments with Jin - trying to wipe out the entire human race, he'd discovered, did wonders for his competetive nature - and the other man was starting to show signs of resentment.

In the left captain's seat, Jin did his best to accept his loss in a mature and sensible fashion, as befitted the man in charge of one of the most heavily-armed ships in the fleet. But Kame's seductive smirk drove all thoughts of maturity out of his head, and he resorted to sticking out his tongue.

Kame looked away and laughed. "Don't point that at me unless you intend to use it."

Jin always enjoyed making up after their arguments. As he leaned across the small armrest that was all that separated them, the rest of the crew uttered a collective groan of "Not again!"

Commander Ueda Tatsuya, the KAT-TUN's second (or third, depending on your perspective) in-command and resident boxing champion, contemplated knocking both lovestruck captains out and throwing them in the brig for the duration of the voyage, but decided he hadn't yet reached the point of leading a mutiny. Despite the KAT-TUN's general disdain for JE fleet regulations and utter refusal to obey any order unless they really felt like it, there were some things that even a bunch of former space-pirates just couldn't do.

Besides, Ueda liked his job. It was just unfortunate that his commanding officers were lunatics all the way up the chain.

"I've already laid in a course," pointed out Ensign Nakamaru Yuichi, hotshot pilot and beatboxer extraordinaire. "If you guys ever bothered to look at the navicomp, you'd know where NGC 1569 is!"

"NG what?" Jin tore his eyes away from Kame long enough to look blankly at the pilot. "I don't even know *what* that is, never mind *where*!"

Ensign Taguchi Junnosuke, the cheerful Head of Communications, gave him a brief rundown. "Our destination today is NGC 1569, a dwarf galaxy in Camelopardalis! Only 2.4 megaparsecs away, its stars are visible even from Earth! What kind of adventures will this mysterious galaxy have for us? Check it out!"

The shaven-headed Security expert, Lieutenant Tanaka Koki, administered a swift kick to Junno's chair, thereby knocking his controller from his hands and causing him to meet a messy fate at the hands of a mutant space-spider in the latest Legend of Zelda game, 'A Link to the Universe'.

"What?" Koki said with a shrug as Junno looked at him in bewilderment. "You're not a talk-show host."

"That still doesn't tell me anything," Jin grumbled. "I thought we were supposed to be going to Alpha Centauri."

"We've been reassigned," Ueda informed him. "Weren't you paying attention to Commodore Yamashita's briefing?"

The two captains looked at each other guiltily, and Kame spoke up first. "I remember Yamapi arriving, but..."

"But we were...uh...distracted. By...the...uh...new additions to Pi's uniform," Jin stammered out. "Didn't you guys think the jacket was really...uh..."

"Colourful," Kame finished for him. "Really colourful. And shiny too."

Unlike the crew of the KAT-TUN, Commodore Yamashita Tomohisa, former smuggler and Jin's best friend, wore the red and black JE uniform. He couldn't, however, resist adding a few touches of his own, particularly when they involved things that were pink and/or furry.

Koki was suspicious - but then, he got paid to be. "After Taguchi loaded the data disc the commodore made us switch the lights off for the briefing. We were in the dark, and I know you couldn't have been mesmerized by the outfit for that long."

"Yeah, aside from the screen, we were in the dark, so-" Nakamaru stopped short as his brain helpfully provided a mental image of what his captains might have been up to while the lights were off.

Kame read his face like an open holonovel. "We were asleep, all right?" he said testily. "It was a long night, we were a little tired, and I couldn't stay awake long enough for Koki to translate the information sent by Arashi."

The Agency of Really Awesome, Smart and Handsome Individuals, military intelligence cleverly camouflaged as a talent agency, provided background on all missions assigned to JE crews. Their skills were numerous and varied, ranging from highly fashionable weapons design to unorthodox espionage aboard alien warships. Despite their differences they were a close-knit group, each and every one of them willing to sacrifice themselves for the rest, and most of their messages were annoyingly happy.

"Koki was translating?" Jin asked, puzzled. "But he's not in Communications."

Koki allowed himself a smug look. "They sent it in rap this time. Nobody knew what the mission was till I deciphered it." He slouched down at his station in a more-gangsta-than-thou pose, crossing his arms over his non-regulation green shirt and allowing an awestruck trainee to place a pair of sunglasses delicately on his nose.

Jin took time out from his confusion to comfort Junno, who didn't look happy to have been bested at his job. "There, there," he said soothingly, petting the other man on the head, "I'm sure you'll pick it up in no time. Koki can teach you. Right?"

Koki assured them that yes, he would be only too happy to teach rap to anyone who wanted to learn. Jin, who had a fair understanding of rap gleaned largely from listening to Koki in the shower, looked around at his crew and smiled. They might not be Arashi, but they were still tight, and there was a bond between them that even the ups and downs of military life couldn't break.

Kame's rudimentary knowledge of rap, acquired during an unfortunate weekend in Yokohama back when he'd been living on Earth, was not up to the task of understanding Sakurai Sho's low, rapid-fire bursts of information. "Did anybody take notes?" he asked.

Junno looked at Nakamaru. Nakamaru looked at Koki. Koki looked at Ueda. Ueda just looked annoyed.

"If I read these out to you, do you promise to pay attention?" he said wearily.

Jin and Kame nodded solemnly, crooking their pinkies. Ueda pulled out his datapad, making sure his hand covered up the Gackt sticker on the back so the others wouldn't laugh at him again, and donned his glasses.

Jin's jaw dropped open. Ueda was beautiful under normal circumstances, even when he was lazing round his cabin in shorts and a stripy shirt, but when he wore glasses...

It took Kame less than a second to realise where his partner's mind was, and it wasn't where it ought to be - namely, on him. He smacked Jin lightly on the back of the head, intending to jar him a little, but jealousy lent unintended strength to the blow and Jin sat down on the floor in a daze.

Kame looked down at him and winced. "Oops."

Jin didn't seem hurt, or even upset. His expression was somewhere between bliss and childlike glee, and he was using his fingers to follow the imaginary winged creatures circling his head. "What an amazing butterfly," he sighed happily.

Kame frowned. "That is not a butterfly," he said. "That is Ueda and if you don't stop looking at him like he's a piece of chocolate cake, I think he's going to kill you." As an afterthought, he added, "And if he doesn't, I will."

That brought Jin back to his senses in a hurry. Kame's threat, even filtered through a pretty haze of butterflies, was serious enough, and painful experience had taught Jin that it was safer for all concerned if he didn't push Kame too far.

The other captain had never quite recovered from his misguided attempts at genocide, and the number of lives lost through his strategies weighed heavily on him still. Even now, he had trouble looking out at the Sol System, preferring to keep the external view off the main screen when at all possible, and was prone to slipping into black moods whenever he allowed guilt to chip away at his carefully-constructed shields. It was easy enough to pretend when his world extended no further than the KAT-TUN's outer hull, but Kame's shipboard confinement would be over in less than a year and he would be free to come and go as he pleased, his debt to society paid.

In theory. In practice, Jin suspected that Kame would go on paying that debt for the rest of his life. He'd committed his own fair share of guilt-worthy offenses - one didn't become captain of a pirate ship by being an angel, after all - but robbing rich merchants was a far cry from wiping out warships. Kame had a lot to deal with.

But as long as they were together, Jin would be there to help him handle it.

Ueda couldn't help but smile at the antics of his captains. "Can I talk now?"

Jin struggled back to his seat and waved a regal hand. "Commander Ueda, please continue with the briefing," he said loftily.

The cluster of trainees loitering at the back of the bridge settled themselves in for a story and began passing around popcorn.

Ueda tactfully ignored the trainees, figuring he couldn't discipline them for it when their own captains had fallen asleep during the previous mission briefing, and proceeded to read aloud from his notes. "We've been pulled from routine patrol in Alpha Centauri to investigate NGC 1569, following the succession of mishaps befalling previous scout ships. The first never returned, the second was found abandoned, drifting at the edge of the Milky Way, and the third..."

"The third?" Kame prompted.

Ueda looked uncomfortable. "The third was one of ours. After two failed attempts it was decided to send out a scout from the military - they sent the K8."

The K8 was a Cougar-class ship, the pride of the JE fleet until the new Jaguar-class came along, and it was both larger and more formidable-looking than the KAT-TUN. The eight coloured stripes running along the hull gave it a fierce appearance, which its crew cheerfully encouraged.

"The K8?" Jin gasped. "What happened to them?"

"The TOKIO picked up a distress signal about two weeks ago from a ship headed for Sol on autopilot. They investigated, found the K8." Ueda's voice was very soft. "There were deep scores on the hull, and the pink stripe had been completely scratched away."

"What about the crew?" asked Kame.

"They're all alive, but..." Ueda struggled to maintain his composure. "They're in a bad way. They took Ambassador Nishikido with them in case they ran into a situation requiring diplomacy, but it doesn't look like he was much help."

Kame wasn't surprised. "He knows less about tact than Jin," he pointed out. "I'm not sure I'd want him trying to talk an alien out of shooting me."

Despite the insult, Jin agreed. "He only wanted the job as a JE ambassador so he'd have an excuse to spend half his time out with the fleet. I hear he's been practically living in Ensign Uchi's quarters on the Pin."

Kame bristled at the reference to Yamapi's bright pink flagship but Jin opted not to notice.

"Qualified diplomat or not," Ueda continued, "he was unconscious when they found him and so were the crew. Most of them still are. They've been hospitalised back on Earth."

"Some of them regained consciousness?" Jin said.

"Sort of." Ueda consulted his notes. "Chief Engineer Ohkura Tadayoshi appears to be in some sort of trance - he believes himself to be at work, and keeps banging on the furniture. Apparently he's quite good - they're selling tickets for his evening performances to raise money for charity."

"Can they really do that while he's in a trance?" Nakamaru wondered.

"They're putting aside a cut for him," Ueda explained. "It's a military hospital, so the patients need as many distractions as they can get. They'd do the same with the K8 Communications officer, Yokoyama Yuu, but his trance hasn't been nearly so useful. All he's doing is babbling nonsensically - something about a bicycle and a bunch of superheroes? Arashi have been trying to analyse it but so far they've come up with nothing."

There was a collective shiver from the crew, even those who'd already heard the story.

"And finally, Captain Shibutani Subaru has had brief periods of consciousness, during which he doesn't speak but emits a strange wailing sound. Again, Arashi are on the case but they're as baffled as his doctors."

"Are you sure there's something wrong with him?" Jin cracked, remembering how weirdly-pitched his one and only disastrous date with the K8's captain had been.

"Of course there's something wrong with him," Kame huffed, "and there's something wrong with Yamapi if he thinks he's going to send us out to meet the same fate!"

"While the commodore is eccentric, to say the least, I don't think he was wrong to choose us," Ueda said unexpectedly. "The K8 may be bigger but they're no match for us when it comes to firepower."

"We've got more shield generators too," Koki chimed in.

"And a better pilot!" This came, unsurprisingly, from Ensign Nakamaru.

"Plus we've got two captains, and that has to be better than one," Junno said brightly.

Jin was shocked. "When did you guys get so gung-ho about the military?"

KAT-TUN's T, T, U and N answered as one. "While you were sleeping!"

"I walked right into that one, didn't I?"

"We both did," Kame said, answering Jin's broad grin with one of his own. "And if we're already on our way, it looks like we accepted the mission in our sleep."

"Impressive, aren't we?"

Ueda regarded Jin warily. "Are you sure you were asleep the whole time? Because you shouted out 'YES!' in English when the commodore asked if you were prepared to accept the mission."

Jin blushed. "I was asleep!"

"Did I say anything to Yamapi?" Kame wanted to know. His cheeks were also faintly coloured.

Ueda shook his head. "Not that I remember. He teleported back to his flagship before we switched the lights back on, and by that point you were both awake. Yawning, but awake. You told me to make the arrangements, which I've done, and said we'd talk in the morning. That was two days ago. I assumed that meant you'd both agreed to the mission and were happy to leave the preparations to me."

"I'm sure we were," Kame said. It was more than a little embarrassing for him to be on what was probably a suicide mission because his partner chose that particular moment to talk in his sleep. He turned to Jin and asked, "What were you dreaming about, anyway?"

Jin's blush deepened. "I don't know but I'm pretty sure you featured in there somewhere."

"Good answer, good answer!" the trainees applauded, throwing their popcorn up in the air. The ongoing soap opera involving the command crew of the KAT-TUN provided more than adequate entertainment for the young trainees, who each picked their favourite officer to support.

"I'd better have done," Kame muttered, "or somebody's going to be sleeping alone for the rest of the trip." It wasn't until he felt every set of eyes in the room fixate on his flustered face that he realised he'd spoken louder than he'd meant to. It wasn't as if his relationship with his co-captain was any secret - the rest of the fleet knew about it, never mind the rest of the crew - but it had only been a few months since they'd rekindled a romance Kame had once thought dead, and he was still getting used to the idea of being half of a whole again.

"Don't worry," Nakamaru reassured Jin. "With this new drive, it's going to be a short journey. Three days at most till we hit NGC 1569. Of course, how long we'll take once we get there, I have no idea."

"Arashi went through the K8's logs," Ueda said. "We know the rough coordinates where they were attacked...or whatever happened to them. They didn't knock themselves out."

Jin snickered. "You haven't been to any of their parties, have you?"

"That has absolutely no relation to this. I think the commodore and Admiral Takki are hoping that we'll find whatever it is before it finds us, and shoot it full of more holes than one of Taguchi's jokes."

Luckily, the tail end of Ueda's sentence was drowned out by Junno's cry of victory as he successfully slew the boss of the third intergalactic dungeon.

Kame groaned. "I think we can come up with a better plan than that in the couple of days it'll take us to get there."

"I don't know," Jin argued, "I think the 'shoot first, ask questions later' plan has its merits. We're more heavily shielded and better armed than anything else that's gone into that galaxy, and I for one would like us to come out of it in better shape too."

"Remind me how we survived in the old days when I used to let you win the arguments all the time?"

"Simple," Jin said with a smile and a wink. "You guys ganged up on me with alcohol and feathers till I changed my mind."

Tickle torture was an excellent incentive for most people to recant their arguments - alas, Kame wasn't ticklish, so Jin never got to avenge himself in kind. He had to settle for getting him drunk instead, which had proven to be an interesting experience the night the artificial gravity failed.

"Then spare me the trouble of finding some feathers and just admit that perhaps we should think about what we're flying into, Jin. This is new, unexplored territory we're talking about. Anyone...anything could be out there."

"And we'll handle it." Jin was doing a good job of projecting a cocksure, confident attitude towards the mission, which he considered to be necessary for the morale of the crew.

It might have done wonders for the trainees, but it only succeeded in irritating Kame further. "Jin, let me remind you what happened last time I met an alien race!"

 _Oh. So that was it._ A metaphorical light bulb clicked on over Jin's head. "And let me remind *you* that you're still under arrest and therefore will not be leaving the ship. No running off with strange alien women this time, okay?" He rested his hand lightly on his co-captain's neck and started playing with the (dyed) coppery strands that fell over his fingers. "Just relax. It's somebody else's turn to wipe out humanity."

When Kame seized Jin's hand and wrenched it away, the older of the two captains realised his joke had fallen flat. "Sorry, sorry, I know that wasn't funny...uh, Kame, you can let go now...that's starting to hurt..."

Kame relinquished his death-grip on Jin's hand and glared furiously at him. "You're right, that wasn't funny. Maybe you're not worried that it could all happen again but I am!"

"Doesn't worry me," Jin said. "I know you're not the same person you were two years ago - neither am I - but that doesn't mean you're going to go crazy again. You're stronger than that, Kame. You wouldn't turn on us again - that's all over now."

"Yeah?" Kame stood up, his face a mix of fear and fury, and headed for the sliding bridge doors. "I betrayed both sides in the same war, Jin - how am I supposed to get over that?"

The doors clanged shut after him, leaving the bridge in painful silence. Trainees cowered in corners while the command crew looked anxiously at their remaining captain.

"What did I say?" Jin wailed.


	2. Chapter 2

It was an uncomfortable trip out of the Milky Way. Nakamaru's estimation of a three-day trip was an accurate one, but every second dragged on for an eternity for the crew of the KAT-TUN. Not even Junno was happy, and he could usually be relied upon to produce a smile no matter how dire the situation.

Kame had locked himself in his cabin, which, like all the others, was equipped with a replicator so he didn't need to bother coming out to find food. No one knew for sure what he was up to, but the portable holoprojector and accompanying headset and gloves were missing, along with every baseball game on the ship.

Jin spent his time on the bridge looking hangdog and miserable until Koki and Ueda contrived to carry him out to his own cabin so he could get some sleep. His presence was having a detrimental effect on the morale of the crew, they insisted, and Kame was never going to want him back if he looked like a zombie.

He had to admit, he needed the rest. In deference to Kame's two-year confinement aboard ship, the KAT-TUN had spent less time planetside or at orbital stations, and more time out in space. Even when they were docked, someone had to stay on board with him at all times, and Jin usually volunteered for the role. As a result, he'd spent less time off the ship in the last year and a half than anyone else in the crew bar Kame himself, and it was starting to get to him.

Jin considered himself a fairly active kind of guy, ready to tackle life head-on and challenge the unknown with a sense of adventure. That was why he'd left Earth in the first place, running away in his early teens and joining Yamapi as a runner for old man Kitagawa. By the time their paths had diverged, Jin already had himself a ship, a crew and a whole new career, and he'd never looked back. He liked where he was, part of a family who looked out for him and needed him.

He needed them just as much, because he didn't want to be alone.

Jin had just finished dressing when his comm badge, a small pin in the shape of a bulldog, chirped noisily from its position inside his shirt pocket. Nakamaru's voice, slightly muffled by the flannel, informed him that they would be in range of the coordinates within an hour and would he consider getting himself back to the bridge because Kame wasn't responding and if one of the captains didn't show up in five minutes Ueda was going to make them turn around and go home again.

For a moment, Jin considered staying in his cabin and practising guitar until the five minutes had long since passed and Ueda had made good on his threat, but reality wasn't going to go away just because he wanted it to. He had responsibilities to live up to, after all, and he was curious to find out what had happened to the K8.

Besides, if he came back with the answer, maybe even a way to help the comatose Osakans, there was a chance Earth President Tsubasa would be grateful enough to cut Kame's sentence short and allow him off the KAT-TUN. That, Jin was sure, would go a long way to solving their problems.

He cast a rueful glance at Kame's locked cabin door and hurried to the bridge.

The mood had changed drastically since he'd been carried out by Ueda and Koki, and the room was in a frenzy not seen since President Imai Tsubasa and Admiral Takizawa Hideaki had married one month earlier. The trainees were scurrying like small, particularly good-looking mice, and Junno was practically tap-dancing on his console.

"What did I miss?" Jin asked in bewilderment.

"Other than Kame storming in here, rooting around for the CNS Plus and storming out again, not much," Koki informed him.

Jin stifled a groan. If Kame was plugging himself into the latest in virtual gaming systems, they weren't going to be able to get through to him until he'd drained all the power from the ship or won the Inner Planet Series, whichever came first.

The CNS Plus had arisen from medical technology, originally used as a means of stimulating damaged nerves in a patient's body by acting as an external translator for brain impulses. One such patient, an enthusiastic gamer with a paralysed leg and more degrees than a circle, had seized the opportunity to modify the device to enhance his gaming experience, combining it with VR gear to accentuate the effects of the virtual world. The result, after some user-friendly modifications, had sold throughout the Sol System.

A gamer playing with the CNS Plus had his body tricked by the device to the extent that he could take a bite of a hotdog in the stands at a baseball game and feel it sliding down his throat. It was addictive - Jin was especially fond of the low-gravity soccer - and it was often the case that a player wouldn't emerge from the game-state without outside help. Clearly, Kame wasn't planning on rejoining the crew any time soon.

Fine. Jin would take care of it himself, the way he had before Pi had brought him the mission that threw Kame back into his life.

"There is one thing, though," Ueda said as Jin assumed his usual position. "I've been studying the K8's logs and they definitely ran into something while they were out here."

"Yeah, they were attacked," Jin said with a shrug. "We knew that."

Ueda tapped a couple of buttons on his console and a static image popped up. "This is from their radar mapper. You see that grey dot?" He pointed to a small blob in the upper left quarter of the screen.

"What about it?"

"That's the only object in the area for light years around. There are no stars nearby, no debris large enough to show up on the scanner, nothing that could possibly have attacked them except that."

"So?" Jin said impatiently. "Then we know what to shoot at."

Ueda jabbed the console again, and another image appeared - this one, from the KAT-TUN's own systems. "I'm not saying it's harmless...but it was stationary when they arrived, and it hasn't moved since then. If it was a ship, don't you think it would've left by now?"

"True. Who attacks people and sticks around to wait for reinforcements to show up?"

"Somebody who's very confident in their ability to take out anything that comes their way," Koki opined.

"Or it could be an unmanned station with an automated defense system," Nakamaru added. "We don't know that there's any life out there and we're not going to know until we get closer."

"Uh, guys?" Junno interrupted. "There might not be life out there but there's definitely something. I'm picking up all kinds of crazy signals."

Sure enough, strange noises and random blips of light were emanating from his station, none of them remotely familiar. The command crew stared in alarm. Were they about to come face to face with an unknown enemy, or was it just that Junno had forgotten to switch off his games again?

"See if you can get anything from that," Jin said at last. "It's not Japanese, it's not English, and I'm pretty sure it's not rap. Beyond that, I have no idea."

"It's not French either," Ueda offered.

Nakamaru was shaking his head sadly. "Worst attempt at beatboxing I've ever heard," he murmured.

"It does sound awfully garbled," Jin agreed.

"Well, at this speed..." Nakamaru suddenly abandoned the rest of his sentence and slammed his fist down on the controls. The ship lurched violently, causing everyone who was still standing to hit the deck.

"What did you do that for?" Jin spluttered, trying to fix his hair.

The pilot grinned apologetically. "Sorry about that. I thought if we dropped to sub-light speeds again we might get better reception. We were moving so fast it's almost impossible to pick anything up."

Ueda, who'd been unlucky enough to get hit in the face by a flying trainee, clambered dizzily to his feet and pressed a tissue to his bleeding nose. "A little warning would've been nice."

"There wasn't any time," Nakamaru explained. "When we slowed down earlier to get an accurate fix on those coordinates," he pointed at the image still on Ueda's screen, "we were a lot further away and I had time to take us down slowly. But at this distance, every second counts. Do you have any idea how powerful our new drive is?"

"Uh..." Jin hadn't been paying close attention when the fleet had offered him a free upgrade as a reward for his part in the war against the Fahngarlians. It had sounded impressive, but when the technicians started talking about anti-matter and crystals he'd tuned out and agreed to have whatever they wanted to give him. "Not really, no."

"Neither do I - I'm still learning! But it's amazing." Nakamaru sighed happily. "In the old days we'd have had to steal one, and now we get given incredible technology like this for free!"

 _Hardly for free_ , Jin thought, considering what they'd had to go through to earn it, but before he could say anything an incoming message blinked on Junno's console.

"Dropping to sub-light speeds hasn't cleared up the mysterious signals, but a message caught up to us from Arashi," Junno said cheerfully. "They've made some progress with the K8 crew! Somehow, Aiba's cracked the problem of Captain Shibutani's wailing - he thinks he's an enka singer!"

Jin pursed his lips and considered this. "That would explain a lot, actually..."

"Poor guy," Koki sympathised. "He's pretty tough, too. What could have scared him so much he got delusional?" Underneath the compassion there was a faint hint of smugness, the implication that he, Lieutenant Tanaka Koki, would not be so weak as to fall victim to the same fate.

"We're about to find out," Nakamaru said, and hit the shipboard radio so he could reach everyone not in the room. "Strap in, everybody, I'm going to speed us up again. We'll be in visual range in about five minutes."

Everyone scrambled to secure themselves on the bridge, and Jin called a warning to Kame via the comm link. He didn't know if the other man would be able to hear him or not, but figured he wouldn't appreciate being thrown around in the middle of his game.

Much to his surprise, he received a response, and it wasn't something he'd ever have said in front of his mother.

"Let's take a look at our mystery, shall we?" Ueda said, politely ignoring Jin's stricken expression. "I'd like to at least know what it looks like before we fire up the large plasma accelerator."

As the KAT-TUN slowed and stopped just inside the maximum visual range, the main viewscreen changed to give the crew their first proper glimpse of the target. No longer a small grey blob, now it was a large grey wheel.

"Hey," Junno pointed at the screen, "doesn't that look like the orbital stations?"

"One without all the insignia, yeah," Koki said, removing his sunglasses for a better look. "I think I even see an airlock."

"All the way out here?" Ueda shook his head. "I don't like it. Where there's a station, there should be people."

"I don't think it's people making these sounds." Junno looked warily at his instruments. "It's more like a radio station for pets, or something."

While the others were discussing what might or might not have been a station, Jin was hunched over in his chair, one leg crossing the other, looking for all the world as if he was about to expire from sheer misery. "He hates me," he wailed to the empty air. "Kame hates me and now he's probably going to spend the rest of his confinement locked in his cabin and I'll never see him again because the moment he can go free he'll leave!"

"But he can't go anywhere yet," Ueda argued, proving that he was actually listening, after all. "So you have to stop worrying about him. Worry about what's out there, instead."

Jin blinked away the moisture that was starting to gather in his eyes, and stared at the viewscreen. "Isn't that an orbital station?" he said dully, only to be met with a chorus of "We've already established that!" from the rest of the crew.

"If we go with that theory, what do you want me to do? Turn around? Move in closer? Stay right where we are while you complain about your love life?"

Jin fixed Nakamaru with a baleful glare. "Since you asked, you can take us closer. We're at maximum zoom as it is, and I want a better look at this thing."

 _If only because dealing with an unknown danger was probably easier - and safer - than trying to fix things with Kame._

As the KAT-TUN slowly approached the station - for indeed, a station it was - the tension level on the bridge rose. Closer and closer until...

"STOP!" Jin yelled in English.

Nakamaru groaned. "You want to stop *now*?" He continued to grumble but managed to coax the engines to a halt. "Why now?"

Ueda hit on the answer immediately. "Because now we're in teleport range." He looked accusingly at Jin. "You want to go across there, don't you?"

Jin looked coyly out from under his fringe. "Maybe."

The others weren't impressed.

"All right, yes, I want to go," he admitted. "When they debrief me and ask what we blew to smithereens, I'd like to be able to give them an answer. Not to mention that if we knew what had affected Subaru and his crew, we might be able to help them. It's worth trying to find out, isn't it?"

"It would be kind of pathetic if we didn't even attempt it," Koki said.

"Right," Nakamaru agreed. "We've come all the way out here - and we were supposed to be investigating anyway, unless you read between the lines of the mission and work out that we're only here to blow things up..."

"The transmissions aren't getting any clearer, but I think we should try too," Junno chimed in. "It's probably some scrambled automated systems - could even be a distress call and we'd never know."

Ueda still looked doubtful. "Remember the damage to the K8's hull? What's to say we're not about to get attacked at any moment?"

"I have a theory," Jin announced. Koki and Nakamaru exchanged glances and burst out laughing, but he refused to be deterred. "How long would it have taken the K8 to fly back, given their engines?"

Nakamaru stopped laughing long enough to answer. "About a month. They were on autopilot the whole time, but it's an old model, doesn't compensate for obstacles well."

"There," Jin said triumphantly. "They could've picked up the damage in collisions on the way home."

"And the missing first scientific exploration vessel before the K8 was sent? The second drifted back without an autopilot, but the first vanished entirely."

Jin wasn't going to let Koki shoot down his theory. "Either it drifted further out into space or it docked and it's inside that thing somewhere. Only the fleet ships have teleport technology - I bet the K8 crew teleported onto the station to investigate, and someone on the ship managed to bring them all back and hit the autopilot before they all turned into zombies."

"And exactly how does our lovesick Captain Akanishi think we're going to avoid the same thing happening to us if anyone teleports over there?" Ueda asked.

Jin had an answer for that as well, though he knew no one else was going to like it. "We don't teleport. I'm taking a shuttle, and I'm going alone. You all wait here and if I don't contact you or return within an hour, you assume I'm dead, blow the whole thing to pieces and get back to Earth as fast as you can."

He winced when Ueda slapped him. The normally serene commander was infuriated, and Jin's smarting cheek told him exactly how much.

"You think doing something suicidally stupid is going to impress him?" Ueda said quietly. "Or maybe you just want a distraction, I don't know. But you can't go by yourself. At least take someone with you."

"Like you said, it's suicidally stupid, and that means I'm not going to let any of you risk yourselves." Jin was adamant on this point. "Somebody has to go but there's no sense in risking the entire crew."

"So the captain goes instead?" Nakamaru sounded almost disgusted.

"A captain. If anything happens to me, you guys have a spare." Jin giggled, slightly hysterical. "You might even be better off that way."

"Not if he never comes out of his cabin again," Ueda muttered.

They did their best to talk him out of it, but Jin would not be swayed. Part of him was excited - the part that enjoyed the kick of danger, the thrill of staking his life on his own abilities. The rest of him, however, was scared stiff, and kept coming up with perfectly sane, logical reasons why they should send one of their two mobile probes onto the station in his stead, and explore through the safety of the camera's lens.

But that would be boring, and more importantly, the probes were very limited in the information they could record. A human had to go, and if Jin didn't leave soon someone was going to succeed in talking him out of it.

"I've made up my mind," he said, and that was that.

\-----

Less than an hour later, Jin was sitting in the cockpit of a small, two-man shuttle, clad in his snazzy silver-and-black space armour, and grateful that the automatic doors on the station's airlock appeared to be in perfect working order. Forcing them open would've been unnecessarily risky, not to mention a waste of time, and he'd left Ueda with explicit instructions on what to do if he neither returned nor contacted the ship after an hour.

Jin fervently hoped it wouldn't come to that. He'd checked his comm link four times on the flight, only to be greeted on each occasion by a distressed trainee. He'd briefly considered leaving a message for Kame but the other captain was bound to ignore it, or perhaps make a suitably scathing remark, so Jin figured it could wait until he got back.

Because he was definitely going back, oh yes.

The inner airlock doors opened to reveal a clear, lighted path to a landing bay, and Jin steered the shuttle smoothly down to an empty spot next to a ship bearing Earth insignia and a Terran Institute of Exploration logo. He opened his armour's comm link for the fifth time, and without waiting for an answer, said, "No doubt about it, guys, I've found the missing ship. It's sitting right next to me in the landing bay. There are dozens of others here but that's the only one I recognise."

Static filled the line for a moment; when it cleared, Junno was on the other end. "Is there anyone in it?"

There was the sound of a thump, followed by Koki's voice in the background. "That ship's been there for months! If there's anyone in there they're probably dead by now."

"I'll let you know when I take a look inside," Jin said, and cut the link.

Not that he particularly wanted to check for corpses, but he knew if he didn't at least take a peek, the curiosity would eat him alive. Besides, someone back at HQ was bound to ask.

He double-checked the armour's seals and life-support systems, made sure his weapons were within easy reach - not, alas, his favourite blaster since he couldn't use the gene-locked trigger without removing the space armour - and popped the hatch on the shuttle. He clambered out, keeping a close watch for any signs of movement in the deserted landing bay.

There were none, nor were there any sounds, not even the usual whine of machinery that no orbital station was ever without. The artificial gravity was working perfectly, Jin was pleased to discover - he had a nasty tendency to get disoriented in freefall - but the generators were totally noiseless. Despite the comfortably warm temperature inside the armour, he shivered. The well-lit landing bay was eerie without the customary commotion, the roar of the ships' engines and the banter of crews as they disembarked. So many ships, all with different styles and markings, most unknown to him, and all abandoned.

Not for the first time in his life, Jin wondered if he'd gotten in over his head. It was all very well acting courageous in front of the crew and vowing to take on all the responsibility himself, but he'd have felt a lot better right now if he'd had someone with him. A silent station was a dead station, and it was easy to lose yourself in the gaping emptiness where life should have flourished.

And human life could have flourished with few problems, he discovered, as the systems in his armour fed back results from atmospheric tests, with a bleep that indicated that the information was being sent to the KAT-TUN as well. The oxygen content of the air was a little on the low side, but no more so than some of Earth's mountains, and conditions were such that he could actually have removed the helmet and breathed without much difficulty.

Tentatively, Jin approached the other vessel, slightly awed by the clomping of boots on the bare floor. Under normal circumstances, he'd never even have noticed. The exploration ship had to have an entrance somewhere; Jin wished he'd paid attention when Ueda had tried to show him the specs. It was a long, narrow craft that showed little wear - no hull scoring here - and he thought he might have been right about the origins of the damage done to the K8.

The port side was clear and Jin was just moving round to check the starboard side when he caught a whisper, the faintest murmur in his helmet's speakers. He shook his head, wondering if he was hearing feedback from the comm link, or someone in his crew was playing tricks on him.

He dismissed it...until it happened again, just as he was about to force the entrance. Jin abandoned the ship and did a quick circuit of the landing bay to assure himself that he really was alone. Just in case, he checked in with the KAT-TUN.

"You guys aren't trying to scare me by whispering down the comm link, are you?" he asked.

"If we were trying to scare you, we'd come up with something a lot more creative," was Nakamaru's reply.

Satisfied, Jin turned back to the exploratory ship. He didn't get very far. A door at the far end of the landing bay, which had been closed since he'd arrived, now rested half-open, the sliding metal doors caught midway. As he watched, they struggled the remainder of the distance and closed the gap.

"What the..." he muttered. "Must be one of those that opens when you approach it, and takes forever to close."

He tested out this theory, not without some trepidation, by marching up to the door; contrarily, it refused to open. Instead, the next door along slid open with a gentle whirring noise, revealing a brightly-lit corridor beyond. As with the landing bay, the corridor was empty.

"Ueda," Jin called down the comm link, "you can track my movements from the armour, right?"

"Right," the commander confirmed. "Why?"

"Don't be alarmed, but I'm just about to leave the landing bay. There's this door...oh, never mind." He signed off before anyone could ask him to explain why he suddenly felt the need to ignore the missing ship and head down an unknown corridor.

Jin didn't think he could explain it. But the closer he got to the door, the louder and more frequent the whispers became. No words, yet. Sounds that, when he paid closer attention, were similar to the bizarre transmissions Junno had been picking up on his instruments. These were bolder, though. More insistent. Downright pushy, even.

It didn't surprise Jin in the least when the doors slammed shut behind him. The corridor looked to be a long one, traversing the length of one of the wheel's spokes, with other - closed - doors set into the wall at intervals. He didn't bother trying any of them. As he walked, the odd squawks, whistles, bleeps and fizzes evened out into a single tone, a pulse that beat an unsteady rhythm inside the helmet's speakers.

It wasn't until Jin neared the wheel's hub that he realised the pulse wasn't in his speakers - it was in his head.


	3. Chapter 3

The virtual crowd went wild as Kame scored yet another home run, bringing the final game of the Inner Planet Series to a close. He tossed his cap in the air and listened to the roar of thousands of people cheering his victory. It was intoxicating.

But then, everything felt that way when he used the CNS Plus. The wooden bat was a solid, comforting weight in his hands; he could smell the popcorn, drink in the sights and sounds of the entire universe - so long as he had a game cartridge inserted, anyway.

But no matter how real it felt, Kame knew it was time for him to emerge from his fantasy world and get back to his life...which meant, getting back to Jin. If the idiot hadn't figured out by now what he'd said to upset Kame, he was never going to. Not without help. If Kame was in the right mood, maybe he'd deign to enlighten his cutely clueless co-captain...and then let him make it up to him.

Kame reached for the off-switch, which, in this particular game, was cunningly disguised as a small turtle painted on the wall of the dugout. One push of a button, and blissful oblivion was over. He'd have to stop pretending the rest of the universe didn't exist. Even if he couldn't leave the ship, there was no way for him to ignore everything outside the hull, and especially not when they were on assignment.

The game shut down fast, cutting off the nerve stimulation so suddenly that Kame could still feel a phantom baseball cap under the VR helmet, hear a ghostly crowd whispering their praise in his ears. With fingers still on sensory overload, he detached himself from the game gear and sank down on his bed. The soft mattress felt good after so many days of total video game immersion, interspersed with the occasional rest and refreshment break, and he was sorely tempted to nap right then and there.

Reluctantly, he pulled himself up and threw on a shirt. Sleep could wait a while.

If he didn't talk to someone who wasn't a hologram, he was going to go _crazy_.

He'd never have been presentable on any other ship in the fleet, but fortunately for Kame, the crew of the KAT-TUN had no use for uniforms other than the occasional bout of cosplay, and his disheveled state wouldn't be cause for so much as a batted eyelid. He made a valiant attempt at fixing his hair - so long spent under a helmet hadn't done it any favours - yanked on a pair of boots, and considered himself ready to face the rest of the crew.

It wasn't a long walk from his cabin to the bridge; even so, Kame was surprised not to run into *anyone* on his travels. The KAT-TUN was never exactly teeming with life but it had a full crew complement, and even during the night, as they kept time, there was a constant, active human presence all over the ship.

It wasn't until he turned down the corridor leading to the bridge that he spotted the first one. A young Ops trainee - Yamada, he thought - was lying unconscious nearby, one hand clutching his comm badge in a tight, painful-looking claw. His mouth moved silently, forming nonsensical words with no air behind them. His pulse beat steadily under Kame's fingers, but nothing the captain could say or do would wake him.

Kame pressed his own comm badge with still-tingling fingers. "Captain Kamenashi calling Sickbay!" He waited for a response; since none was forthcoming, he kept going. "I need medical assistance just outside the bridge. Yamada has collapsed and-"

He broke off as the trainee spasmed in his arms, muscles seizing and contracting several times in quick succession before the helpless young man slid from Kame's grasp. Kame didn't fancy trying to carry him to Sickbay single-handedly, and none of the medical team were responding to his call, which left him with the option of looking to the bridge for help. He pulled Yamada out of the way of oncoming traffic, patted him on the head, and hurried the final few feet to press his thumb to the keypad by the door.

Kame had been only mildly alarmed by the sight of an unconscious trainee. After all, they tended to pass out on a regular basis when overwhelmed by something amazing and shiny. It wasn't a major cause for concern.

What *was* a cause not for mere concern but for outright, mindless panic, was the sight that awaited Kame as the bridge doors slowly parted. He couldn't help himself; his mouth fell open and he stared blindly about the room, not really seeing anything, trying hard not to see. Ghostly ballplayers swung their bats in the corners of his eyes, remnants of the CNS Plus, and he tried to fix on them and the crack that rang in his ears as the wood connected with the ball.

But they were fake - artificial distractions only, a poor effort to hide the truth from Kame's senses. And it was an unpleasant truth. Carnage would have been easier to deal with. Anything was better than the sight of every last man on the bridge slumped over their stations, or fallen to the floor, lying in death's repose with not a mark to show for it.

Kame walked to each crew member in turn, examining them, looking into their sightless eyes and trying desperately to rouse them. None stirred. Kame's pleas for them to wake up went unheard, as did his command over the ship's internal radio for anyone who was awake to contact the bridge. In his heart, he knew there would be no reply.

In between the echoes of his baseball game, Kame could hear every breath drawn; some easy and restful, others a laboured wheeze. Until he approached Ensign Taguchi Junnosuke's station, he heard nothing else. As he paused before the flashing screens and blinking lights, he noticed a curious static in the air, a fizzing, crackling sound with intermittent beeps and whistles. It hurt his ears to listen to.

He fumbled around at the console, trying to turn off what he assumed was a malfunctioning comm link, when he realised the sounds were coming from an external source. Something outside...and close by.

Force of habit had kept him from looking at the main viewscreen - he had no wish to look out at the universe where he'd almost wiped out his own species for something as petty as jealousy - but he did so now, turning slowly to the giant viewer that dominated most of one wall, fearful of what he might see.

Nothing so sinister as he'd been imagining - an orbital station. Missing insignia, yes, but a recognisable object nonetheless. He racked his brains to remember if any independent systems used the wheel design, but came up empty. Maybe they were in an intergalactic dumping ground, one of the corners of the vast universe where obsolete and failed technology, too useless even to sell for parts, was abandoned for the scavengers.

As much as Kame liked that idea, he knew it couldn't be true. If the station was non-functional, why was it transmitting signals?

He was still fiddling with the controls, trying to at least turn the volume down, when Junno abruptly got to his feet and took a few unsteady steps away from Kame.

Alarmed, Kame took a few steps of his own in the opposite direction. The other man's usual joie de vivre was nowhere to be seen - or rather, it no longer existed outside his head. His unblinking eyes didn't see Kame, and when the captain called his name the sound never reached his ears. The entranced ensign found himself a clear space, grinned widely at an unseen audience, and began to tap dance.

To make matters even more surreal, he extended his hands and began to juggle with empty air.

Kame wasn't sure whether to laugh, cry, or kick Junno and hope he woke up. Not that the other man wasn't entertaining, but there was something horribly creepy about watching the rapid, lively movements coupled with dead eyes. It was as if a corpse had returned from the grave to pursue a life in showbusiness.

His vision blurred and he stumbled back towards the door, keeping himself as far out of range as he could. He'd been touching the ensign only a moment ago, checking for a pulse, but he felt that if he touched him now, Junno would seize him by the wrist and draw him down into the depths of mesmerized madness, from which there would be no escape.

And escape, he must. It was obvious what had happened. That station, that harmless looking wheel, was clearly what Yamapi had sent them to find. His crew were acting exactly like the similarly-afflicted crew of the K8 - either unconscious, or in a trance of sorts - and he was willing to bet his favourite chair that the strange signals were responsible. He was going to have to silence the link - destroy the speakers if he had to - and try to wake everyone up. The trainees, Koki, Ueda, Nakamaru, Junno, Jin...

 _Jin?_

Kame scanned the bridge again, expecting to see his partner draped in some suitably seductive pose over a console, but Jin wasn't on the bridge. The rest of the command crew were, though, which meant that Jin should have been with them. There was, of course, always a chance that he'd been elsewhere on the ship when the crew had fallen victim to the station's signals. Poor Yamada was living proof that it was unnecessary to be in the same room.

Junno dropped an imaginary ball and it rolled towards Kame, so he darted hastily out the way until the juggler retrieved it and continued his routine from his new position by the unconscious Nakamaru.

 _Just so long as he stays away from the door,_ Kame thought grimly. _And well away from me._

There was no way for Kame to know exactly where Jin was, but using the ship's communications system, he could find out where his comm badge was. A quick sweep of the KAT-TUN confirmed Kame's worst nightmare.

 _Jin was gone._

 _Don't panic,_ Kame told himself sternly. _Just because you're confined to a ship currently occupied by a comatose crew and your partner has vanished without leaving so much as a note is no reason to get upset._

He didn't believe himself for a minute, that was the trouble. Kame had gotten used to lying to himself, because that made it easier to lie to everyone else. Except Jin, because Jin always wanted to believe the best of him, no matter what he did, and regardless of how much the truth hurt, Kame thought there was one person for whom only honesty would do.

Keeping a wary eye on the still-merry Ensign Taguchi, Kame checked the ship's logs. The KAT-TUN had, from all accounts, been stationary within teleport range of the station for almost two days, though the teleport equipment hadn't seen any activity since the mission briefing.

However, one of the shuttles had been launched.

It had to be Jin. According to the computers, everyone else was still on board - or their comm badges were, at any rate - and it was typical of the other captain to take it upon himself to investigate and try to keep his crew out of danger.

Shame he hadn't realised how far that danger's reach extended.

There was no sign of the shuttle on either the viewscreen or the radar mapper, so Kame surmised that it was now inside the station. He checked the reports that had come back over the comm link from Jin's space armour, confirming for himself that not only was the protective gear not required, but there seemed to be some sort of malfunction in the helmet causing Jin to hear whispers. Given the signals emanating from the station, Kame suspected the "malfunction" was anything but.

Jin's last transmission to the KAT-TUN had been to tell them that he was leaving the landing bay, and confirm that they could track him using his armour. They had, but not for much longer. From the coordinates, Kame could tell that Jin had been heading down one of the spokes, moving directly towards the central hub, but the suit had stopped showing up on the scanner after only a few minutes. There was no way to tell if Jin had actually made it to his destination, or if something had happened to him.

Whichever it was, he hadn't returned. Kame was the only person conscious enough to do anything about it, and he was forbidden to leave the ship.

A slow smirk spread across Kame's face. So maybe he was in the military now, and supposed to follow orders, but being a good little soldier and locking himself away on the ship wasn't going to help him find Jin. Besides, the longer he stayed within range of that signal, the greater his chances of falling under its spell.

It was starting to wear away at him even now, grating on his nerves and working its way through to his brain. Kame rifled under his seat for the emergency sewing kit he kept there to replace buttons during unfortunate incidents, coming up with a sharp needle. He quickly jabbed his left pinky, but instead of the sharp pain catapulting him into clarity, it drove him further from it, propelling him back towards the feel of his hands around the bat. Wood pressed against his fingers; the crowd roared incoherent support and the tang of juice drunk many games ago lingered sweetly on his tongue.

With his senses under assault from the after-effects of an extended session with the CNS Plus, Kame didn't dare pilot a shuttle, and he certainly wasn't going to take the ship closer. The best thing he could do, he reasoned, would be to program the KAT-TUN's autopilot with instructions to return to the fleet, setting a delay to allow himself sufficient time to effect a rescue. The crew weren't going to notice if they spent another half-day hanging around outside the station, but he couldn't leave them there for good.

On the other hand, if they left too early, he'd never catch up to them. The shuttles were meant for short trips only, weren't capable of anything faster than sub-light speeds and didn't have room for supplies for more than a few weeks at best. That was assuming Jin's shuttle was still in working order, of course, because if it wasn't, Kame's rescue was going to fail spectacularly.

 _At least if it's a one-way trip, they can't lock me up for breaching the terms of my confinement,_ he thought.

It took Kame all of ten minutes to prepare himself. Space armour evidently hadn't gotten Jin anywhere, so he didn't bother with any, though he did arm himself with a stunner and the blaster with a gene-locked trigger that Jin had bought him for his last birthday. He didn't actually have his own suit - the military had prohibited him from owning customised space armour until his probationary period was up, the idea being that he was less likely to try to leave the ship if he had to put up with one of the generic suits that were stored for every member of the crew for safety reasons. They weren't designed for comfort.

Programming the autopilot was child's play, even with the phantom baseball players constantly striking out just within his range of vision, though he did have a tough time dodging the invisible juggling balls that always seemed to fly in his direction. Nakamaru, while still unconscious, was somehow beatboxing in time to Junno's tap-dancing, and Kame contemplated recording the event for posterity.

Then he decided it was just too creepy.

There was nothing more he could do for the crew now. Either he and Jin would return in the shuttle - because regardless of Jin's status, Kame was bringing him back - or they'd both die on the station, leaving the KAT-TUN to make her own way home. With any luck, by the time they got back Arashi would have figured out how to wake them.

Kame sighed. Jin's selfless act had turned out to be very selfish indeed, through no fault of his own. But even if Jin hadn't been his friend, partner and lover, Kame would still have gone after him for no more complicated reason than that he owed him, and he always honoured his debts.

A few quick presses and the teleport coordinates were set for what Kame considered a "safe" place - the landing bay Jin had mentioned before he'd set off for the hub. He could send himself to the station without a problem, but unfortunately, the teleport could only be operated from the ship, and there was no one conscious to bring him back. He did experimentally poke Ueda's finger with the needle, just in case, but the commander remained solidly asleep - not that this slowed his punches any. Kame dodged a vicious right hook and slammed his free hand down on the control before he could stop to think about it.

In less time than it took him to make a trainee faint, Kame was standing in the station's landing bay, slightly dizzy from the unfamiliar atmosphere and awestruck by the number of ships surrounding him. He spotted the KAT-TUN's shuttle immediately - the large purple letters reading 'CARSHRIMP' on the side were a dead giveaway - but he didn't recognise many of the other crafts.

There was the exploratory vessel, of course, which Jin, unless he'd forgotten to report it, hadn't checked out. There were also several cruisers that he thought might have been from Ganymede, and one that he would've sworn was a Fahngarlian long-range fighter. The rest, he was in the dark about. Many of them looked old and beaten-up, and Kame wondered how many years the station had been in operation.

The landing bay was cold, and he was glad he'd thought to add a few extra layers before leaving. The plaid shirt he'd been wearing originally was all very well, but it wouldn't have done much to stop him from freezing to death, unlike space armour, with its internal temperature regulation. Nonetheless, he shivered, more from unease than chill. The silence should have been more peaceful than on the KAT-TUN, given that he didn't have to look at the comatose bodies of his friends.

It wasn't. Even with a ghostly crowd singing snatches of the International Anthem in his ears, the silence was overwhelming.

As a means of distraction, Kame began to circle the landing bay; Jin had mentioned a door, and there were many to choose from. Fortunately, Kame didn't have to guess. From the data fed back to the KAT-TUN, he knew Jin's path until he dropped off the radar, and thus he knew that he'd find what he was looking for at the far end of the long room.

But first, he wanted to see what else was out there. The last thing he wanted was to be attacked from behind.

His quest proved fruitless; all the other doors, electronically locked, refused to open no matter how he tried to cajole, threaten and downright force them. Stubborn though he was, Kame got nowhere. Eventually he approached the "right" door, and as he did so, something curious happened.

The bleeps, clicks and whistles he'd heard through the KAT-TUN's speakers were coming from somewhere behind that door...straight into his head. They even pierced the dreadful, off-key singing of the baseball fans, crawling inside his mind on twisted, skittery legs. Kame closed his eyes. It didn't help. Even in the darkness behind his eyelids, he could see the second baseman throwing to third, accompanied by a series of high-pitched squeals. Somehow, he didn't think it was the guy on third complaining because he'd been hit in the face by the ball.

The door whirred softly as it opened, but it was loud enough to startle Kame into accidentally jabbing himself with the needle he still held, and he opened his eyes. The extra sensitivity in his fingers spread to the rest of his body, to the point where he was barely even aware of his location, let alone the strange sounds. As far as his senses were concerned, he was next up to bat.

Stepping up to the plate took him through the door, and the bright lights of the corridor beyond made his eyes start to water. He walked blindly, ignoring the doors on either side of him. Jin would have done the same, he knew. He'd have gone for the hub, and Kame was going to follow. Every time the signal became too strong for him to bear, he pricked himself with the needle. He was going to look like a pincushion by the time he got back to the ship, but at least he'd be awake.

Finding Jin seemed to take forever, and the corridor never changed. One long, straight, gleaming white passage with harsh yellow lights. It was only slightly reassuring to Kame that he saw no signs of the crews of all those other ships. Were they beyond the locked doors...or dead?

Eventually, Kame reached the end of the corridor. There was only one door now - directly ahead of him. He checked his watch: though the walk seemed to have taken hours, there was actually plenty of time remaining before the KAT-TUN's autopilot began to run. That didn't mean he could allow himself to feel relieved. If Jin had made it through that door, he hadn't come back again, and Kame had no idea what was on the other side. Logically, it should have been the central computer, and alive with human activity.

That didn't seem likely.

As the door opened automatically, the signal increased in strength, the varied sounds blending into a single pulse that beat relentlessly inside his brain. With an immense effort of will, Kame forced it out, commanding himself to focus on the CNS Plus after-effects instead. His overlong exposure to the game system had temporarily wreaked havoc with his senses, but it was the only thing preventing him from ending up like the rest of his crew. With his nervous system on overdrive, the additional stimuli left over from the game gave him something else to respond to, with the occasional sharp reminder from the point of a needle.

The station's signal, Kame surmised, overwhelmed the listener's senses, feeding them false information much as the CNS Plus did, but taking the much more risky route of putting them to sleep and duping them into thinking they were really a part of the situation. It was only too obvious that Ensign Taguchi believed himself to be tap-dancing - while juggling - and if Yamapi's briefing was to be believed, some of the K8 crew were also indulging themselves in their own private worlds.

For those still unconscious, it might be only a matter of time before they "woke up" and joined in the fun. Kame had no intention of being one of that number. The CNS Plus effects wouldn't last forever, and he had to get them out of there before he lost his advantage.

Kame held the needle in one hand, poised against his palm, and held the blaster in the other. He needn't have bothered - there was no one for him to shoot.

He'd been right about the contents of the hub. The centre of the enormous room was occupied by an immense computer, set in a column between floor and ceiling, a sprawl of massive grey wires and boxes. The blank screens and casings were cracked in several places, leaving dark gaps from which thick black cables emerged to tangle on the floor below. Other cracks appeared to have been forced from the inside out - the casings bulged, and in the gaps shone what looked like pieces of red plastic. Kame thought he'd never seen anything more grotesque.

Workstations were dotted here and there, all empty. The whirring fans and electronic whines combined to form a low, hollow rumble that sounded almost alive, the roar of a giant creature intimidating its prey.

As an intimidation tactic, it was working nicely. Kame was relieved to see that Jin was nowhere near the mechanical monstrosity - the other captain was lying prone near the door, still in his space armour. Kame rushed over to him and knelt down, then fell back in horror.

The floor beneath he and Jin was the same dull grey as the walls of the room, and extended in a thick band for maybe four feet. A matching band surrounded the computer, though it was hard to tell under all the mess, and the two were joined by narrow paths at regular intervals.

But the rest of the floor...wasn't a floor at all.

It was transparent, for one thing, though the underside was badly stained and speckled with drops of dark brown and red liquid. Peering cautiously down, Kame discovered why.

What he saw made him glad he'd barely eaten in the past few days. The whereabouts of the missing crew members was no longer a mystery. He could see their bodies - some in uniforms, some in civilian clothing - stacked in an untidy heap just below him. The transparent band of floor was divided into two parts - an outer ring, closest to the door, where corpses were stockpiled, and an inner ring that ran close to the computer, where they were pulverised.

The noise that Kame had attributed to fans was, in fact, caused by all manner of tools for reducing the human body (and some that might not have been human) to nothing more than a slimy mulch. The results ran down a channel into the centre of the room, below the computer, and Kame couldn't make out what happened to it.

He didn't want to know. As it was, he was having to battle rising nausea, and he didn't think Jin would appreciate Kame throwing up all over his pretty space armour. They *had* to get out of there.

Kame couldn't carry Jin, not with the armour weighing him down, and other than the helmet, he couldn't remove any of it without Jin's cooperation. He had to wake him up. He reached for the seal at the base of the neck, intending to release it and pop the helmet off, when the rumble underneath him grew louder.

Reluctantly, he looked at the floor. It was receding, slowly but surely, into the outer band.

That didn't leave them much room to play with. It didn't do wonders for the atmosphere either, though the smell wasn't as bad as Kame had feared. Now that he had an unobscured view, the corpses were covered in some kind of clear liquid that seemed to preserve them. None of those in Kame's line of sight appeared to have been dead for even a day - assuming they really were dead, and not just unconscious. He felt bad about it, but he didn't want to put his hand down there and find out, especially since he'd have to reach so far that he'd be at risk of falling in himself.

The increased noise level helped Kame to ignore the pulse that wanted to do to his brain what the machines below would do to his body. Even so, it wouldn't be enough to wake Jin.

Kame succeeded in removing the helmet, revealing a face that, in anyone else, he would have said was deep in thought. Unpleasant thought. Jin was clearly asleep, but his dreams didn't look to be sweet ones.

Had Kame realised about the CNS Plus earlier, he'd have used it on his crew and brought it with to use on Jin. He was sure that the artificial sensory replacements would have worked, sooner or later. Unfortunately, he hadn't had that particular revelation until after he'd teleported across. He was going to have to get through to Jin some other way.

Hearing was out - if the machinery hadn't woken him up, it wasn't going to. Likewise, the smell rising from the pulped corpses wasn't affecting anyone but Kame. Jin's eyes were closed, and even if he opened them, they'd be unseeing. Taste brought with it a risk of choking.

That left touch.

Fortunately, Kame knew the place where Jin was exceptionally sensitive. A small patch of skin on his collarbone, where Kame had once hit him with a shockstick on full power. Though the skin was no longer burned, the nerve endings remained abnormally sensitive - a fact Kame frequently took advantage of in the bedroom.

It was hardly the most romantic of settings, of course, but there was no time to be lost. No time for the niceties, either. Kame pushed the armour and the shirt underneath aside as much as he could, then bent down over Jin and bit down on the spot, not quite hard enough to draw blood but more than sufficient to make the other man scream under normal circumstances.

This time, Jin did scream, but when Kame saw the look in his now-open eyes he knew his bite had nothing to do with it.


	4. Chapter 4

The overhead warning lights came on to signal that all passengers should return to their seats and strap themselves in for a landing, and the captain's voice advised them that within the hour they would be arriving at their destination. The JJ Express was an old ship, incapable of fancy manoeuvres, and conveying an orphanage full of five-to-fifteen year olds from Earth all the way to Ross 154 was the most ambitious act it had ever undertaken. Taking them back in a week's time, after they'd had their fair share of museum trips and other treats donated by kindly souls, would probably be its final journey before it and its elderly captain were retired.

One child would not be making the return trip - but then, orphanage kids went missing all the time, presumed to be runaways, and if a certain Japanese fourteen year-old took the opportunity to strike out on his own on Ross 154's moon, no one would care. They'd do a cursory search, of course, and tut about what a shame it was that families only wanted to adopt babies and younger children these days, that a child of his age didn't really stand a chance and he'd probably be better off on his own. After all, they didn't really know him. No one at the orphanage did.

Not when he'd only been there for a week.

Akanishi Jin packed away the card game he'd been playing with the girl next to him, strapped himself in and settled back in his seat to stargaze. He was careful not to let his face show anything more than the normal excitement any kid who'd never been off-world before would display, but in reality, he was far happier than that. When they landed, he'd go through Customs with the rest of the kids and their harrassed chaperones and vanish at the first opportunity. No one would notice the disappearance of 'Jimmy Mackey', the name he'd given when he'd shown up at the orphanage a week ago under the pretext of having run away from an abusive keeper. They'd taken him in, no questions asked, and the bags under his eyes and skittish behaviour had been enough to persuade them he was telling the truth.

He genuinely hadn't been sleeping much of late, but not because he was being abused. Because he was so excited he could barely keep from grinning about it.

Only fourteen, and this was only his third job for old man Kitagawa, and he was going solo!

It would, he reflected, have been nice if he could've worked with his best friend again, but Yamashita Tomohisa had his own job to do and unfortunately, two new arrivals at the orphanage who both disappeared on Ross 154's moon would draw more suspicion than one. Jin had to handle this one by himself. The old man had promised that if he succeeded, he'd have one of his pilots teach Jin how to fly a shuttle.

Of course, if he failed, his life was forfeit, but he knew that when he joined. The risks were great...but the potential for reward was enormous.

"You think it'll take us long to get through Customs?" the girl next to him asked. "I hear there's a lot of stuff that's banned on Ross 154, and they're really strict when they check you through."

Jin shrugged. "What do they think a bunch of broke orphans are going to be hiding? Do we look like a gang of criminals?"

The girl cast her eyes over Jin's face and blushed. "You certainly don't."

He grinned and went back to watching passing ships. Closer to the planet, the traffic was heavier and every vessel had to adhere strictly to its assigned entry route or risk being fined - or worse, hit by another ship. It wouldn't be long before they landed, and Jin's task really began.

The first part had been easy. Getting himself included in the orphanage trip to Ross 154 had been simple enough, and he'd picked up the "package" the morning of the flight. The man who met him in the park hadn't given him any details, just advised him not to let it get crushed. If asked, he was to say that the three small plastic bottles inside held medication, though on no account was he to drink the contents. The labels contained false names for an illness he didn't have, but nobody expected an orphan to be in perfect health. He'd wrapped the package in spare clothing and squeezed it in his bag, making sure he kept it with him at all times during the journey.

Customs on Earth hadn't been a problem either. If anyone showed unusual interest in Jin and his belongings, he was supposed to use the other kids to create a diversion, but really, it hadn't been necessary. There wasn't a great deal that was actually banned on Earth - consequently, as long as you weren't carrying an unlicensed weapon, fuel, explosives or naughty postcards, you could leave the planet without anyone caring what you were taking with you. Whether your luggage was legal at the other end of the journey was someone else's problem.

Unfortunately for Jin, the girl was right about the Customs on Ross 154. While the star itself was uninhabitable, its moon had proven otherwise, and what had started as a small, experimental colony had quickly covered the bulk of the land. Security was very tight, which was why the old man was having him deliver a package while disguised as a harmless orphan on a trip, surrounded by innocent children.

At least the system was open to the public again, since the fuss over wannabe-Emperor Gackt's attempted coup of the galaxy had died down. The singer-turned-politician had raised an army and tried to declare himself emperor with Ross 154 as his power base, but the Sol System's military, spearheaded by the JE Fleet, had put paid to his plans. He'd have been tried and likely executed, if only he'd been found. By the time the dust settled, the man had gone into hiding, and his secret laboratories had been located and destroyed.

Personally, Jin wasn't so sure about that. According to the intergalactic news bulletins, Gackt's labs had been dabbling in highly illegal experiments involving the marriage of organic and mechanical matter, using humans against their will in brutal and gruesome ways. There were rumours that the would-be emperor was seeking immortality by using technology to extend his lifespan, which, based on the interviews he'd seen with the man, Jin thought was probably true. Some of the nastier goings-on in the labs had only been shown on the midnight broadcasts, and there was no telling how much remained unseen.

As a result of the staged coup, entry regulations for the system had tightened up, and even chemicals used for medicinal purposes were subject to intense scrutiny. Despite Yamashita insisting to the contrary, Jin wasn't an idiot. He knew Kitagawa had had dealings with Gackt before, and he didn't put it past him to be using Jin to smuggle banned chemicals to what remained of the underground scientific community. Jin just hoped the bottles hadn't been damaged in transit, because he didn't dare unwrap them to check.

If he was caught, he wouldn't have to worry about repercussions from the old man. The local authorities would enforce the law...and Jin would never worry about anything again.

\-----

"Have a good flight?"

The question was in English, and caught Jin off-guard. "Sorry?"

"Did you have a good flight?" his guide repeated, switching to Japanese and smiling. "Any problems at this end?"

Jin returned the smile and patted the bag slung over his shoulder. "Nothing I couldn't handle."

As expected, Customs had been a lengthy trial. After the paperwork was dealt with came the bag check. Every single incoming passenger had to have their luggage inspected, and if the orphans hadn't been allowed to bring only one bag each, the queue would have been longer still. Jin whiled away the time standing in line by chatting to the people on either side of him, acting casual and occasionally helping to retrieve one of the smaller children who'd gotten fed up and decided to wander off. He'd discovered, over the last week, that he was actually quite good with kids, and it lent credence to his cover story to play the part of the kind, helpful big brother.

The spaceport staff were grateful for the assistance - their patience was limited and their skills didn't extend to chasing and consoling a large group of fractious children. When Jin was only a few feet away from the checkpoint, a small girl ran up from further down the line and started tugging at the legs of the guards. She howled as she tore at their clothes, their bootlaces and anything else she could reach, and the weary remaining chaperones exchanged despairing looks with the spaceport staff.

Jin saw an opportunity, and he took it. He stepped out of the queue and scooped up the little girl, holding her close to his chest and whispering soothing words in her ear to make her stop crying. He stroked her hair gently and she cuddled up to him, wrapping her small arms round his neck and refusing to let go. All the adults in the room breathed a collective sigh of relief.

"Can I take her through?" Jin asked. "We'll go get some juice, or something."

Once the passengers made it through the baggage check they were allowed to leave, and Jin knew there were shops and restaurants out in the terminal just through the door. Most of the passengers from the JJ Express were already there, refreshing themselves and waiting for the rest of the party to join them.

The officials, who by this point never wanted to see another child again as long as they lived, waved him through. What sort of contraband were a bunch of kids going to be carrying anyway?

Jin nodded politely and carried his young charge through the barrier, not even looking back in case they changed their minds and ordered him to hand over the bag for inspection, and made his way through to join the rest. He quickly located the girl he'd been sitting next to on the flight and asked her if she'd mind watching the little one while he went to the bathroom.

"Are we really going to get some juice?" the girl in his arms asked.

Jin set her on the down on the seat; he didn't like to disappoint her. "You know what?" he said, pulling out an unopened carton he'd picked up on the flight but forgotten to drink. "I've got some right here in my bag. I've been saving it for a special person and I think that might be you."

He handed her the drink and she gave him a big, toothy smile in return. He grinned back and kissed her on the cheek before he turned and left, ostensibly heading for the bathroom but actually going for the public comm terminals, which were round the corner from it.

Most of the terminals were in use, but he found an empty one, set the audiovisual-shielding to "full" and keyed in a number from memory. Within seconds, his contact appeared on the screen. The man had said little, only confirmed Jin's identity and current location, and had arranged a meeting point. Within ten minutes, Jin found himself being transported away from the spaceport and out to the rocky wastelands just outside the capital.

Once they'd reached an innocuous-looking building bearing the legend 'Merlin's Magical Sweet Factory', the contact had handed him over to a woman inside, who'd double-checked Jin's identity and led him through the factory. Much to his surprise, it was fully operational, and his guide allowed him to sample a few sweets on the way. She took him to an office in the back, where she sorted out his travel papers for the roundabout trip back to Earth and left him with food, drink and a change of clothing while she fetched a third contact - the man who was currently taking Jin down a secret lift.

"How far down are we going?" Jin asked curiously.

"Only another ten floors," his guide assured him. "We would have collected the package from you and sent you on your way by now, but Mr. Kitagawa wants visual confirmation of our activities here. We've sent pictures, of course, but he'd like a guarantee that they weren't faked. Since he can't leave Earth himself, that means we need you to witness a little project we're working on, okay? You might even find it interesting."

Jin didn't care whether he found it interesting or not, so long as he got to complete his job and get out of there. He suddenly wanted very much to go home, away from the cold, stark corridors of the hidden underground floors of the factory, and back to the life he knew, back on Earth. Unlike his fellows on the JJ Express, it wasn't his first trip off-world, but it was the furthest he'd ever been from home and there was something about the situation that made him uncomfortable. He just wanted to go back to the pink-and-black bedroom he shared with Yamashita and curl up next to his best friend so they could tell each other stupid jokes and practise secret handshakes.

But if the tickets now tucked in his jacket pocket were any indication, it was going to be a long - albeit scenic - trip home.

"Here we are," his guide said cheerfully as they emerged from the lift into another dimly-lit corridor. "Straight through this door." He led Jin into a room opposite and watched with amusement as the boy's mouth dropped open.

In the centre of the room was the biggest computer he'd ever seen. Towers were stacked round a giant screen, everything gleaming and new, shiny grey and white, with eager technicians clustered round like bees on a flower. At the back was a large glass box, though a swathe of purple fabric was draped over so only the base showed; Jin couldn't make out what was inside.

"Impressive, isn't it?" his guide commented.

Jin nodded, but at the risk of seeming stupid he had to ask. "What is it, exactly?"

"A computer, dear boy, a computer! But you can see that for yourself, can't you?" The man laughed, but not mockingly. "What I need you to confirm to your boss is just how special this computer really is. At least, it will be thanks to your successful delivery." He waved the three plastic bottles Jin had been carrying.

"Hey!" Jin felt his bag. "When did you take those out?"

"While you were changing. Sorry about that, but you know how it goes." He didn't sound at all apologetic. "What you see here is the latest incarnation of a project that's been around since before you were born - the culmination of a lifetime of work on the merger of organic matter and technology. Can you imagine what it would be like to fly in a ship with an autopilot that used a human brain? A computer is powerful, but even the most advanced machine can't think for itself. The human brain...we can't begin to understand how complex it is, how much potential has gone unexplored thanks to the cowardly bureaucrats!"

"So it *was* true," Jin marvelled aloud.

His guide took a deep breath and started again, calmer. "It's all true - only the spin they put on it is false. There's no limit to what we can do if we only let ourselves try, and my employer is a man who understands that." He didn't name names, but they both knew who he meant. "This particular model is intended for use in a much more complex project than anything we've accomplished so far. Up until now, we've tested nothing larger than a shuttle, but the results have been spectacular!"

Jin looked at his watch. "I don't mean to rush you, but according to the tickets you guys gave me I need to catch a flight to Barnard's Star in a couple of hours."

"Of course, of course." His guide seemed a little embarrassed. "You'll have to excuse my enthusiasm - as project leader, I'm entitled to get a little carried away sometimes! Anyway, this is for use in an experimental orbital station. Every function will be taken care of using an artificial core - a human who would have an entire electronic world literally at their fingertips!"

"A whole human?" Jin hoped his shock didn't offend the other man, but the concept was horrible. "I thought you used donor brains from people who were dying?" Or so the less biased of the news bulletins had said, anyway.

"We do, but for something on this scale we require a little more in the way of organic parts. To put it simply, what will happen is that the drives and needs of a human body will be acted upon by the station's hardware. The human will feel everything that happens inside as if it were happening to them physically. The perfect merger of man and machine! If the mechanical "body" becomes damaged, the brain will respond accordingly and take action to repair it with far more efficiency than any auto-repair system yet invented.

"Say, for example, the damage was caused by a gang of thieves scavenging parts. What normal auto-repair system would use station resources to track down the guilty parties and have them incarcerated, all without the necessity of alerting any human agents?"

Jin had to admit, it did sound kind of impressive. The part where they needed a whole human still bothered him, though, and he looked around nervously in case they were after volunteers.

His guide patted him on the shoulder with one white-gloved hand. "Don't worry, dear boy, we wouldn't dream of involving you! We're only interested in adults, and I believe you still have a few years of growth ahead of you, hmm? No, we have what we need - a man who is whole and fully-functioning in both body and brain, but sadly, of a disposition entirely unsuited to life in human society. He appreciates the power he will have at his disposal, the new abilities he will gain; he can even redesign the entire station if he so wishes, and his mechanical "arms" will carry out the work. He volunteered to be our test subject, so you need not be concerned on that score, regardless of what you've heard."

Somehow, that didn't make Jin feel any better about it. "So what do you need the bottles for?"

"Ah..." His guide held up the aforementioned bottles. "Our subject has, unfortunately, developed a slight ailment, which we would need to cure before the station goes live."

Jin looked at them suspiciously. "You mean they really are medicines?"

"Oh yes. Not the medicines on the labels, admittedly, but medicines nonetheless."

Jin groaned. "I thought I was carrying banned chemicals or something!"

The other man shook his head and smiled. "They're banned, all right. No mind-altering substances are allowed in this system. This one prevents the user from feeling pain, the blue one is used to give pleasure and the green one affects the brainstem in ways that you don't have time to hear about."

"I've been smuggling drugs?"

"All in a good cause. I need to give these to our subject now, so if you would just accompany me round the back, I'll introduce you. Mr. Kitagawa would like you to confirm his identity for yourself - I'm sure you'll have no trouble recognising him."

Jin allowed himself to be led to the giant glass box at the back of the room, heart in his throat and sweat beading at his temples. His guide pressed a button on the wall and the cover slowly rose, revealing a slim man dressed only in a tunic and a serpent's nest of wires.

 _No wonder the authorities had never found the would-be emperor._

Unable to stop himself, Jin screamed.

\-----

 

"Jin!"

Jin's head was pounding, a pulse beating with annoying regularity coupled with a roar that would have done an old-fashioned jet plane proud. To make matters worse, some idiot was calling his name and shaking him by the shoulders.

He blinked several times before his vision cleared, and the idiot was revealed to be none other than Kame.

"You're not supposed to be here," Jin mumbled. "You can't be here. Why are you here?"

Kame hugged him tightly. "I am here, and neither of us should be. Can you walk?"

The floor wasn't *that* comfortable, even if the prospect of getting to his feet wasn't any more appealing. "Don't see why not."

"Good." Kame got a shoulder under Jin's arm and helped him up. "Don't look down. Don't look back, either. Just look at the door."

Needless to say, Jin did all of these things except the one he was actually supposed to do. He took in the grisly scene below, caught sight of the hideous, bulging computer in the centre of the room, and it all came flooding back to him in bright, gaudy colours.

How he'd marched to the hub, compelled by the pulse of the signal in his mind, and how it had overtaken him completely as he'd seen the computer. He'd collapsed to the ground - fortunately, on the metal outer ring by the door - and lost consciousness.

He filled Kame in as the other captain frantically tried to open the door, but it was sealed shut. In between bouts of cursing, Kame told his side of the story, and both of them struggled with the door till they were exhausted.

Jin was horrified to hear about the KAT-TUN's crew. "I tried to keep them out of it," he wailed. "I thought they'd be safe!"

Kame sighed. "They might be, if the autopilot works okay and somebody back home has figured out how to help them, but we won't be safe for much longer. The effects of the CNS Plus will wear off soon and I don't think pricking my finger will do much good after that. That thing," he pointed at the computer, "will have us both."

"Not if we destroy it first," Jin stated.

Kame looked down at the narrow strips crossing the open floor and grimaced. "Do you fancy going over there and taking your chances? Because I don't. I'm not even sure shooting it would help."

"It would just fix itself automatically," Jin said, and explained the memory he'd been reliving under the computer's influence. "I know what this is, Kame. After I left Ross 154, the next thing I heard about the station was years later, just before I went independent.

"The experiment was a failure - whatever that medication was, it didn't work. The computer went crazy! The, uh, organic parts were supposed to be fed a constant supply of nutrients through a tube, but once the station went live it redesigned - this room, I guess - so the floor was a trap for humans. It started sending out these pulses, signals that entranced anyone within range and drew them in here to become part of...well, you can see for yourself. It's feeding on humans, Kame."

Kame's face was pale. "That's sick."

"Right, it *is* sick," Jin continued. "Very sick, and they couldn't cure it. They couldn't even destroy it. Anyone on board died in here, and anyone trying to blow it up from a distance lost their minds. No one could get within range. The only thing they could do was tow it out to the middle of nowhere and hope nobody ever found it again, which obviously hasn't worked. They couldn't warn anyone without incriminating themselves, and these guys, Kame, they weren't looking for publicity. None of them even told me their names!"

The situation looked bleak. If they didn't get out soon, all they had to look forward to was losing their minds until they too joined the pile of corpses feeding the machine.

"All those ships," Kame murmured, "their crews are lying beneath us."

"If they haven't already been absorbed." Jin hauled himself up again and renewed his efforts with the door. "Look, Kame, I know it's not really a good time but I just want to say...uh...well...I'm not that good at expressing myself, and I know I say things I shouldn't and I don't mean them, I don't mean to hurt you."

Kame rolled his eyes. "Jin, if you're trying to apologise there are a couple of words you could try instead of rambling."

Jin wrapped himself around his partner, steering them both round so neither had to look at the death trap across the room, and dropped his head to Kame's shoulder. "I'm sorry," he whispered.

Kame pulled back slightly and offered him a grin. "I'm not," he said. "If I hadn't been mad enough to storm off and plug myself into an interactive games console for a half a week, you'd be dead already and the rest of us would be either comatose or insane."

"That's a good point," Jin agreed. If he was going to die, at least he wasn't going to do so thinking Kame hated him.

What Kame was actually thinking that moment had nothing to do with Jin, hated or otherwise. He was puzzling over the computer. "That machine, can it do anything else to us other than try to get in our heads and persuade us to walk over the edge?"

Jin thought back to everything he'd seen and heard. "Not that I remember. Luckily they never built weapons for the station, although I suppose it could use the servos to attack us if it really wanted to." He cast a dubious glance round the room. "There can't be any in here, or it would already have tried to push us in."

"So if I shoot the door, the computer can't do anything about it, right?"

Jin brightened considerably. "Right! We can do that!" He reached for the gun attached to the suit, and his face fell. "The power pack's dead on this one."

Kame pulled Jin's customised blaster from under his jacket. "Here. When I went to grab mine, I saw you'd left yours so I thought I'd bring it along."

Jin stripped off the gloves of his suit and relished the comforting weight of it in his hand. Their matching guns, both created by Arashi's stylish weapons designer MatsuJun, were sleek, elegant, and always in fashion. The gene-locked triggers ensured no one else could use them, and the power packs could use almost anything to recharge. Consequently, even on the lowest setting they were weapons to be reckoned with.

"We can't do anything with the lock," Kame reasoned. "Let's both aim for the same spot and try to burn our way through."

Unfortunately, putting enough distance between themselves and their target to avoid injuring themselves left both men standing worryingly close to the edge of the outer band of floor. Kame fired first to show Jin where he thought they should start, and his partner added his own power to the assault.

Before long they had a nice, hot outline burning into the door, and the temperature in the room had increased so much that Jin wished he could put the rest of his space armour on. He'd always felt that it was a major design flaw that the internal temperature regulation system only worked when all parts of the suit were sealed together.

The temperature wasn't the only thing on the rise. The noise level was growing as well, and since Jin had the advantage of not having baseball fans yelling in his ears, he heard it first.

"Is it just me," he panted, "or is it getting louder? The computer, I mean."

"Not just you," Kame said, mopping the sweat from his brow with his free hand. They were both looking extremely bedraggled by this point. "I think it's annoyed with us."

Jin couldn't really blame it. The pulse in his head had died away, drowned out by the noise, but the infernal machine was still making its presence felt. "Wouldn't you be if someone started taking shots at you? This is its body we're burning!"

Not *his* body, because there was no way Jin could reconcile the bloated, diseased monstrosity before him with the sparkling new hope for the future he'd been shown. Whatever humanity it might once have had, it was nothing more than a machine now. A broken machine, one beyond his or anybody else's ability to repair.

He was about to say as much when something long and thin wrapped itself around his ankles, jerking his legs out from under him. His finger closed on the trigger as he went down and he shot wildly, hitting the ceiling rather than the door.

"Jin!"

Jin managed to get his blaster back under his control and looked at his assailant. It was a cable, looking for all the world like a long, black snake, and it was beginning to drag him across the floor. "It's all right!" he yelled, and fired at the cable where it emerged from the body of the machine. It broke, and Jin was able to untangle his legs and resume the attack on the door.

"I thought you said it couldn't hurt us!" Kame yelled.

"I didn't say I was certain!" Jin retorted. "It can modify anything it wants, so long as it has the parts, and it's got more than enough ships in the landing bay to scavenge from! Look out!"

Another cable lashed out, aiming for Kame's gun arm. He dodged and shot it at the point of origin, but another took its place. "You think we could do something to distract it?"

Jin wasn't sure whether or not to take Kame seriously. "Like what? You doing a striptease?"

"You're the one wearing armour. Besides, how do we know it even likes men?"

"Kame, I don't think this computer likes _anybody_!"

Kame was forced to concede that Jin had a point. "Anyway, I wasn't suggesting anything like that. I meant, one of us could concentrate on the door and the other could do some damage to the rest of the room. There must be some optical sensors somewhere, and if we can take those out..."

If nothing else, the cables wouldn't know where to strike. Jin approved of that, especially since one of them had just tried to remove his armour. "You take the door. Leave the cables to me."

Kame gave him a quick nod and focused all his attention on burning through the door. There wasn't much further to go. Between them they'd built up a nice, steady glow, and if they could only get near the door, Kame suspected they might be able to kick it out soon. Too bad they'd have to wait for it to cool down - it was made of metal, and Kame was in no mood to lose the soles of his boots to it.

Meanwhile, Jin was finding himself grateful for all the target practise he'd gotten in since joining the military. The cables moved fast, and while he was shooting one at the source, another was already aiming for him. He didn't have time to target anything else, much less look for potential weak spots. "How much longer, Kame?"

The other man promptly turned round and joined in the attack on the computer. "As long as it takes for that door to cool down, unless you want to ask the machine nicely if it'll open it for us." He was surprised to see Jin smirking next to him. "What? You're actually going to try that?"

"Definitely not. Keep them off my back, will you? I'm going to try something."

Out of the corner of his eye, Kame could see Jin donning the discarded gloves and helmet of his space armour and engaging the seals. The suit was supposed to protect against extreme temperatures, but Kame wasn't sure what its limits were, and there was no telling if it would be enough to keep Jin from being fried.

He wanted to tell him that, to beg him to wait, to plead with him not to risk himself, but even if he had the breath left to talk, there was no way Jin could hear him. All he could do was keep firing, and wait.

Kame didn't have to wait long. Jin's powerful legs struck the door again and again, and it gave a little more each time. When the metal finally gave way, falling to the corridor outside with a resounding crash, Kame finally felt his heart start beating again.

Jin removed his helmet and gloves, attaching the former to the fastening on the back and the latter to the belt round the suit's waist, and took his blaster in one hand and Kame's free hand in the other. "Come on!"

Kame fired one final shot as Jin pulled him towards the door, and it hit the screen dead centre. The glass shattered and an enraged roar sounded from the depths of the room.

"That'll give it something to worry about other than us!" he gasped out as they ran for the landing bay. "I don't care how fast it repairs itself - it can't be that quick to replace the glass!"

Indeed, the computer made no move to arrest their flight. As they raced down the corridor, the effects of the CNS Plus finally dissipated and Kame was able to immerse himself fully in the real world for the first time in days. It wasn't, perhaps, the ideal time to lose the only advantage he had over a monstrous machine that wanted to turn him into mulch, but it was worth it to be able to feel Jin's hand in his, skin warm and dry from its brief spell in the suit, and know that he wasn't holding hands with the first baseman again.

Much to their relief, the door to the landing bay was hanging open. They reached their shuttle, strapped themselves in, then realised they weren't quite home free.

"The airlock doors," Jin groaned. "They opened automatically to let me in, but I don't think they'll do the same to let us out."

"There have to be manual controls somewhere!" Kame used the external optics to scan the landing bay, and quickly found what he was looking for. "Look! On the wall by the doors. I think that's the emergency release."

In the event that a station had to evacuate and no one was staying behind to man the controls, all airlock doors had a manual release that opened both the internal and external sets. There was just one catch. It opened both sets at once, and once they were open, they stayed that way. It was the final exit.

Jin nodded. "I see it. Hold on tight - I'm going to hit it, and once those doors open, if the restraints don't hold up we're going to get sucked out. I won't be able to get us moving in the right direction until we stablise."

It was a difficult angle for the shot; Jin ended up using one of the small, guided torpedoes to hit the emergency release. It exploded upon impact and the airlock doors began their slow, painful separation.

"Come on, come on," Kame muttered under his breath. He'd had enough of waiting. He watched as the darkness of space appeared in the gap between the doors, which were perfectly synchronised, and anything that wasn't bolted down made a rush for the exit.

The restraints holding their shuttle creaked ominously but refused to break, saving them a short, rocky trip outside. Jin started the engines, which was the trigger for the restraints to cut out, and they were able to take off in relative calm, though they did have to dodge a lot of debris in the immediate vicinity.

Now that all the systems were on-line, they could see the KAT-TUN waiting for them. Kame mentally calculated the time to reach the ship and was relieved to be able to tell Jin that no, the autopilot wouldn't kick in and whisk salvation away from them before they could make it back. That fact notwithstanding, Jin pushed the little craft as hard as he dared - his first flying teacher, one of old man Kitagawa's trusted right hands, had taught him plenty about coaxing speed out of anything with an engine, though not much about flight safety.

"You think they'll give me another two years for leaving the ship?" Kame asked. The tiny location monitoring chip under the skin of his left thigh would have let HQ know all about his transgression by now - not that he really had the energy to care. All he wanted was a nice cold shower, followed by a soak in a hot tub - preferably with Jin by his side.

"I think they should give you a medal." Jin started laughing and added, "And if they don't, I will!"

"We're the same rank," Kame pointed out. "You can't give me a medal."

"Now you're sounding like Ueda. Hey, maybe we should give *him* a medal! Look how well he holds everything together in our absence!"

"And even in our presence." Kame thought about the briefing they'd both slept through, and started laughing himself.

"Let's give them all medals! Koki can always use more bling."

"Look who's talking!" Kame tapped Jin's wrists, which, when not covered by space armour, usually bore at least a couple of bangles. "Besides, I don't think military decorations are all that gangsta, Jin..."


	5. Epilogue

"To sum up, in light of your dedication to duty and noble sacrifices made to save the lives of your fellow crew members - hey, are you guys listening to me?"

"We're trying to," Jin said with a scowl, "but there's a lot of static on the line."

Commodore Yamashita Tomohisa plucked idly at the feathers decorating his new hat, and tried again. "So, dedication to duty and other fine, noble things...oh, forget it. Basically, Earth President Tsubasa wasn't so sure about you breaking the terms of your arrest, but Admiral Takki persuaded him that he shouldn't punish you...oh, and he's rescinded the sentence too, so you're a free man now. You can have your doctor take the chip out for you."

"Yes!" Kame was filled with glee. "I love honeymooning couples!"

The commodore looked slightly wistful to be reminded of the recent nuptials of his mentor, but the screen was so fuzzy that no one noticed. The KAT-TUN had sustained damage on the trip home from NGC 1569, and repairs were still a work in progress.

Actually, the damage had been inflicted before they left. Once Jin and Kame had reached the KAT-TUN, Kame had plugged Ueda into the CNS Plus using the most stimulating game he could find - Grand Theft Autopilot 12: Rings of Saturn. Six hijackings, four robberies and a couple of unexplained homicides later, the commander was out of his trance, gasping for breath and swearing that he'd never, ever steal a Cheetah-class racer again because they were just too much hard work.

While Kame started deprogramming Koki, figuring he could use the help to catch the still-dancing Junno, Jin summed up the events of the past two days for Ueda in as few words as he could manage. He ended by asking him to fire up the larger of their two plasma accelerators, both of which were installed due to a mix-up at the shipyards, and destroy the station. It had stopped transmitting signals, but he didn't for one moment believe the threat had been neutralised.

As the only person on the ship who'd actually bothered to read the manuals, Ueda saw the logic in this, and tottered off to start setting things in motion.

Kame stuck with the same game to wake up the rest of the crew, though after Nakamaru recovered his senses he left the task to him. Explanations were issued in batches till everyone was awake and up to speed on events, which happened just in time for the destruction of the unmanned station.

Well, Jin reflected, it wasn't completely _unmanned_ , but there was nothing left of humanity on board save the remains of the dead. They deserved better than to be reduced to pulp, and a burial in space was all he could give them. There had been no time to take note of the other ships in the landing bay; he could confirm the presence of the missing exploratory vessel but that was all. One of the ships inside had been sucked out of the airlock doors and drifted a short distance away - the force of the explosion propelled it towards the KAT-TUN, causing some small damage.

The next order of business for Jin and Kame was to collapse, which they did in grand style, and it wasn't until they slowed down nearer home that Yamapi was able to call them and ask what the hell was going on. The explanation they'd given, complete with sensor data and random commentary by Jin, had floored him completely.

He'd called back a couple of hours later after consulting with the admiral and his new spouse, catching them relaxing in Kame's cabin.

Yamapi sat up straight, gave them his most military expression and said with the utmost formality, "Congratulations, Captain Kamenashi Kazuya." He spoiled the effect by breaking into a sly grin. "Now you don't have to stick with our Captain Bakanishi anymore."

"Akanishi!" Jin yelled.

"Isn't that what he said?" Kame mused. "It's hard to tell with all that static." Jin glowered at his best friend despite knowing the expression would be wasted over such a bad line, and Kame snagged his arm. "Cheer up, Jin. We can go wherever we want now!"

Yamapi coughed, delicately at first then more obviously when it became apparent that no one could hear him. "Not quite," he said. "You're both still in the military!"

"And long overdue some leave," Jin said with a seductive smile, and switched off first the lights, then the screen.

Yamapi knew better than to call them back.

\-----

 **A few hours later...**

Jin woke up with a start, clutching his stomach in agony. It took him a moment to realise why. Kame, caught in the throes of a bad dream, had hit him sharply with the full force of his elbow.

Again.

"Hey," Jin said in a pained voice, shaking Kame by the shoulder. "Wake up, will you?"

"Huh?"

"And you tell me *my* pillowtalk could use some work!"

Kame was still disoriented. "Sorry. What?"

"You hit me again."

"Oh." Kame reached over and hit the bedside light, giving his cabin a gentle glow. "Sorry about that. Where did I get you this time?"

Jin pouted and pointed to his stomach. Kame rolled up the other man's T-shirt and placed his palm on the tender skin. "Here?" he asked. At Jin's nod, Kame started stroking soothing circles, trying hard not to tickle. "Any better?"

"Maybe a little," Jin conceded. "What were you dreaming about? What we saw on that station?"

"I was surprised, but no, actually. I was having this nightmare about you having an affair with Koki."

Jin squawked in surprise, but Kame thought he detected a telltale blush. "You are?"

"No!" Jin rushed to deny it. "Not for a long time. It's just that, uh, after you left, everyone said I should try seeing other people."

"Go on," Kame said sternly.

Jin gulped. Kame's hand was still on his stomach, but no longer soothing. "So...first I had this date with Subaru and it kept raining and it went _horribly_ and then somehow I wound up seeing Koki but it was just too weird," he said in a single breath. "I mean, he kept dressing up in a skirt, high heels and a long blond wig - not that he didn't look kind of hot, but that's not the point..."

The gentle circles on his stomach resumed, and Jin allowed himself to relax. Kame wasn't going to do something stupid in a fit of jealousy again - not that he was going to be such an idiot as to comment on it this time...

Kame laughed softly. "I don't know. What am I going to do with you, Captain Akanishi?"

"Bakanishi!" Jin corrected automatically, then realised he'd been tricked. "You did that on purpose."

"Of course." Kame reached out again and switched off the light. "But really, what am I going to do with you, Jin?"

"Love me?" Jin suggested.

Kame shifted lower down the bed so he could replace his hand with his lips, kissing Jin's bruised stomach better. "I think I can manage that..."


End file.
